Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This? (41 page)

Prohibition was repealed. After thirteen years, the sale of alcohol became legal again on December 5, 1933, and the speakeasy era, in which Dorothy learned to drink, would soon fade to a memory. Even though Prohibition had never interfered with her drinking—quite the opposite—she enjoyed the new freedom, particularly in Alan’s company, as they made the rounds of her favorite saloons. One night they were drinking at Tony’s when their voices began to rise. Alan got up and angrily stamped out. Dorothy, left fingering the silverware, looked around and smiled at the people sitting nearby. “I don’t know why he should get so angry,” she said to Emily Hahn, “just because I called him a fawn’s ass.”

Ordinarily, Alan did not react to such provocative remarks. Having grown up with drinking parents, he instinctively understood that in these situations somebody had to be responsible and usually it was himself. He knew what Dorothy badly needed was somebody to take charge, and Alan took great pleasure in being a manager. On a practical level, he endeared himself by sobering her up, making excuses, and getting her out of jams whenever necessary. There were some problems about which he could do nothing but shake his head in astonishment, however. By this time, her debts had grown so sizable that it seemed she could never repay them if she lived to be a hundred. Her method of handling money and debt was careless. She disposed of her earnings by reckless spending until nothing was left and then panicking, at which point she would shoot off an apologetic telegram to Viking, asking that five hundred dollars be deposited in National City Bank.

Part of her financial distress was due to generosity. She was quick to give away money to any friend who needed it. When John O’Hara faced a domestic crisis and required fifty dollars in a hurry, she wrote a check and ordered him never to mention the matter again, because she was so deeply in debt that fifty dollars made no difference. She also helped her sister, who was working as a salesclerk at Gimbel’s. George Droste died in 1932, and Helen recently married Victor Grimwood, a retired schoolteacher in his sixties and a sportsman who was the author of a book on fly fishing. Sometimes the Grimwoods were hard up. Dorothy agreed to cosign a bank loan for Victor, a kindness that did not prevent her from complaining about him behind his back. The members of her family, she grumbled, “seem to have retired from active work of any kind. That is, all except my brother-in-law, who has a dandy business. He makes ships’ models. Of course, it’s a little dull at the moment, but it’ll come back.”

Attracting a man as young as Alan pleased Dorothy, but she also felt extremely sensitive about the difference in their ages. For the most part, she carried off the situation by never mentioning Alan’s true age and pretending he was merely a few years her junior. Only among her closest friends did she joke about it. When Howard Dietz once needled her about Alan being too straitlaced for her, she agreed but wondered what could be done about it. “Oh yes,” she said, “we could send him to military school.” Instead of dwelling on his youth, she preferred to emphasize the fact that he was a Southerner and affectionately began referring to him as “the Colonel.”

Dorothy went out of her way to help the Colonel. In January 1934, presumably as a result of introducing him to her close friends Ellen and Philip Barry, Alan was cast in Barry’s new play,
The Joyous Season
. That same month Dorothy made up her mind to leave the Lowell and moved into an apartment building at 444 East Fifty-second Street, which afforded an unbroken view of the garbage in the East River and was located, as she said, “far enough east to plant tea.” At first she found the new apartment oppressive, but after Philip Barry’s play had closed, the Colonel began spending most of his time there with her. By spring they were more or less living together.

With a new home and a new lover, it seemed only natural to buy a dog, and she acquired a Bedlington terrier. “I picked him out because Bedlingtons are trained to root up gardens and hunt otters, and my New York apartment was simply infested with otters.” No animal of Dorothy’s was exposed to the concepts of obedience training or housebreaking, and Wolf proved no exception. To compound the problem of owning an untrained puppy, Alan insisted that Wolf should have a friend, and they decided to get a second, fully grown Bedlington, Cora. One night they were at the Murphys’ Beekman Place apartment with John O’Hara, waiting for the arrival of Ernest Hemingway. After four hours, he had not shown up and the Bedlingtons grew restless. So did O’Hara, who felt antagonistic toward Sara because he suspected that she disliked him. As he gleefully reported to Hemingway later, “I had the pleasure of watching first one dog, then another taking a squirt on Mrs. Murphy’s expensive rugs.”

That spring Dorothy saw a good deal of Scott Fitzgerald, who was living in Baltimore while Zelda underwent treatment at Johns Hopkins. Scott was busy revising Tender
Is
the Night for an April publication date. Dorothy had not seen him for several years, although the previous fall, she had impulsively written to him, when Ring Lardner had died of a heart attack at the age of forty-eight. She and John O’Hara were sitting over coffee in the Baltimore Dairy Lunch late one night while Dorothy read the latest issue of
The New Republic
containing Scott’s obituary of Ring. Dorothy could not help weeping. O’Hara irritated her by repeating, “Isn’t it swell?” until she finally told him, “The Gettysburg Address was good too.” Writing in what appears to be crayon, she scrawled a tipsy note to Scott: “I think your piece about Ring is the finest and most moving thing I have ever read,” and she signed it “Dorothy Parker, N.Y. City,” as if she and Scott were complete strangers.

He telephoned to thank her, but they did not meet again until April, when Zelda’s paintings and drawings were exhibited at a Manhattan art gallery. Dorothy, who attended the exhibition with the Murphys and Adele Lovett, dutifully made several purchases. She paid thirty-five dollars for two watercolors, one of them a portrait of Scott wearing a crown of thorns and the other a dancer who resembled Zelda. She was shocked to find the prices pitifully low. Zelda had talent, she thought, but the painful qualities of the work and the dominating color of blood red upset her. She knew she would never hang the pictures in her apartment.

During this period, while Zelda was temporarily living at a rest home on the Hudson River, Scott made frequent visits to New York, where he stayed at the Algonquin or the Plaza. His pockets stuffed with catalogs for Zelda’s exhibit, he turned up at Tony’s or telephoned Dorothy, eager to ramble around all night partying and asking for introductions to women. Jim Thurber obliged. Dorothy did not, but she once invited him to join her, John O’Hara, and O’Hara’s former wife, Helen. To O’Hara’s dismay, as they were seeing Helen home, Scott began making passes in the cab, and she did not bother to fight him off. When the taxi pulled up at her door, Scott immediately climbed out and escorted her inside, even though he was so drunk that he needed the doorman’s assistance to walk.

“He’s awful,” Dorothy protested to O’Hara. “Why didn’t you punch him?”

O’Hara replied that Helen was entitled to behave as she liked.

Years later Dorothy confided in a friend that she had slept with Scott, but added that it had been nothing more than a fleeting affair. Since he was an alcoholic like herself, she could feel compassion for him, but he made her uncomfortable for the same reason. She despised in him the very qualities she hated in herself—sniveling self-pity, the way they both wasted their talent, their lack of self-discipline. And, like herself, Scott could be tiresome when he was drinking. It is not impossible that they slept with each other once or twice in some unplanned encounter when both of them were drunk. However, given her deepening involvement with Alan at this time, the fact that they were living together and spending most of their time in each other’s company, it seems unlikely that she went out of her way to have affairs.

Some of her friends wondered what sort of erotic relationship she was having with Alan. Some were pleased to speculate that there was little physical intimacy at all. In order to make such remarks, they had to ignore the obvious, which was that “in addition to their friendship they had a real physical love for each other so strong that it was startling to see,” as one friend said.

Before meeting Dorothy, Alan’s involvements with the opposite sex had been with older women, with whom he slept or lived and whom he treated like daughters. He’d once, for example, lived with actress Estelle Winwood. Sid Perelman classified Alan as a homosexual, temporarily non-practicing. Other friends tended to agree with Ruth Goetz who said, “All the time I knew Alan I never saw him do anything overtly homosexual. I sensed, however, that somewhere in his past there had been homosexual friendships.”

Regardless of what people said, it was increasingly clear that Dorothy loved Alan and that he loved her. With her history, her seeming knack for selecting those very men incapable of loving back, this development seemed excellent progress. Marc Connelly was one friend who welcomed Alan. “When Dottie fell in love, she fell in love. She didn’t swim in a fishpond, you know; she went into the ocean. Alan was a nice boy, a good boy. She was very much in love with him, and so he was welcome.”

Although Alan’s wit was not in the same class as Dorothy’s, his conversation was rarely dull. He had an engaging sense of humor and a highly developed idea of fun. One evening when they were drinking in a Village bar, another customer, whose appearance was decidedly effeminate, began to interrogate Dorothy about her literary tastes. Did she prefer this author or that author? Did she ever read fairy tales?

“My dear,” she replied, “let us not talk shop.”

Alan laughed so hard he almost fell on the floor. Later that evening, still feeling merry, he suggested that they have themselves tattooed. They had themselves decorated at one of the Bowery tattoo parlors with matching blue stars in the insides of their upper arms. Afterward, Dorothy complained that she would be condemned to wearing long sleeves for the rest of her life.

After Dorothy’s tattoo was revealed in a gossip column, the
New York Daily Mirror
dispatched a reporter to find out where it was located. Sheilah Graham, a young Englishwoman, arrived to find Dorothy having cocktails with Alan and John O’Hara. Shyly, Dorothy pushed up the sleeve of her dress to show Graham her arm and apologized for the boring location of the star. It was so tiny that Graham had trouble distinguishing the design. Dorothy offered Graham a drink, said she liked her, and assured her they would become close friends. She urged her to call again, an invitation Graham took seriously. After she had stopped by several times, always informed that Mrs. Parker was out, she realized that Dorothy had been making a fool of her.

1) Twelve-year-old Dorothy Rothschild at the Soldiers and Sailors Monument in Riverside Park, January 1906. (HELEN IVESON. ROBERT IVESON. MARGARET DROSTE. SUSAN COTTON)

2) A Sunday outing in Riverside Park, 1906. Dorothy poses with brother Bert, her dog Rags, sister Helen, and sister-in-law Mate. Absent is oldest brother Harry, who would subsequently cut himself off entirely from the family. (HELEN IVESON. ROBERT IVESON. MARGARET DROSTE SUSAN COTTON)